


The Ice

by bloodbonebraid



Category: Warcraft III, World of Warcraft
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-29 13:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15073835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbonebraid/pseuds/bloodbonebraid
Summary: The Dark Lady meditates.





	The Ice

In sleet and roaring wind, stood a cold and unrepentant king.

From far below, there came the sounds of war, thinned by the wind, a low, keening howl. A rising storm had breached to overwhelm him. He had lived his last day.

Still, he did not appear to see his enemies advancing, nor did he heed their hungry cries for vengeance. All he heard was the emptiness. All he saw was the ice.

His hand reshaped to bear its weight, bloody Frostmourne rested, cold, in his unfeeling grip; and drifting tendrils of spectral mist, rising from deeply-graven runic sigils, wreathed both the sorcerous weapon and its silent wielder in chains of phantom light.

From the shadows, Sylvanas watched him; and she could hear them now... _the voices of the sacrificed, the murdered, and forsaken… their cries but hopeless whispers, lost within the rapacious blade._

They might have been the shrieking of the incessant, belling wind, but for one lonely fragment among the many remnants of the dead and damned, _her own voice,_ still screaming without cease.

Sometimes it seemed the deathless torment consuming her was but a dark, malignant dream, and with desperate longing would she pray to _wake…_ that she might find the nightmare fading with the dawn, her broken world whole again, and this fallen prince, still golden in his distant, living kingdom.

Made furious by the taunting lie, Sylvanas forced deliberate fingers over flesh long dead, seeking where the truth was carved—in the old wound—in the bite of death, where he had killed her.

Pain was but an echo of his voice, a spider's shadow in her mind. Yet underlying it, beneath the chill of quenchless rage, there slipped another sort of spider. It flexed and crept through the deepest reaches of her dead heart, a murmuring, stealthy stranger—interloper—this one, secret thing she feared.

_What will remain of_ _me_ , it whispered _, when that ruthless will is broken, and even_ _he is nothing but a ghost?_

What was this travesty condemning her that she might be _diminished_ by his death? Made less without his hate. _How had her murderer become her measure?_ The very force that made her real and gave her purpose.

Sensing her presence, he leaned cold, questing thoughts into the edges of a once-familiar, now shadowy mind; and he whispered, _“Sylvanas…”_ as he turned his ferocious eyes upon her. A pitiless gaze, alive now only in its gelid malice, it was the very heart of the ice.

How many years had passed since she had felt the ruinous weight of his terrible power? A lost space of ringing time outside his fatal glamour. Yet, had there not always been a part of her that _ached_ for his ice touch? _Yes_... so tightly woven with the rage they were inextricably the same.

She hated him; he was the source of all pain, the very embodiment of her loss. Yet, he fed the hunger possessing her; and she knew a part of her would starve to death when he was gone.

He stepped closer, and the wind hissed across the heavy razor of the ravenous blade, tossing veils of snow upon its mirrored surface. His strong wrist, slowly turning, marked the smoldering arc of a weapon forged of hate and hunger, one shaped to snare, to steal, to kill.

He gave her a slight, sardonic smile, opening his arms to her, as if the dead might embrace.

_And oh, how he had changed;_ for she could _see_ it upon him now—the ice. He shimmered with its sleet. The glacier's chill breath enfolded him, as a lover's abiding, faint perfume. He belonged to the ice; his fate was fixed. And as ice had shaped him, it now ruled him. In lethal traceries of frost, in endless darkness, it mantled him; and in the covetous dust of snow he wore was the bitter caress of his seducer's cold intimacy.

There was an appetite in the ice; it was a roaring famine—and made voracious by it he had once...

...c _ome to her, icicles chiming softly in his ghostly hair as she brushed it back from his malevolent eyes that he might clearly see her hate. Her hand on his pale brow, fierce fingers twisting in his rime-tangled mane as she drew his face to hers, for the sharp caress of a monster's kiss, for the taste of rage between them. And even as he wounded her,_ _she honed her jagged, lethal edges—keen, to pierce him_.

She felt the death in his caress; and she saw what lived in his cruel eyes—watching, fuming, coldly willing—as she took and tortured him with what was lost. His frozen flesh, relenting to her unforgiving touch, gleamed hard and white, bleak as the moonlit falling snow.

Hate was their god; and its command was their one devotion.

Furious eyes locked in malice, his mocking laughter, softly whispered in her ear—an ice kiss, cold smile, his hard hands upon her. No lie could live in the fusion of their chill—only the naked honesty of violence.

Ice creatures—dead to desire, yet forever bound by lust and rage—they were ghosts, insatiable, in parody of a thing too warm to be remembered. The truth of it had long been broken and forgotten, cast aside as sacrifice, to the hunger to hurt that overshadowed all.

They had shared the ice, embraced the hate; and in silence without expectation, each had accepted the intolerable touch of the other—even hers, _even_ _his_ —as the only mask they had to hide the grimace of emptiness.

And in those shadow moments—resonant, and yet, so still—he would look at her, as through some frail veil of memory, where something hidden struggled in silence for release. As a secret lingers—close, but undisclosed.

Sometimes, in the dead space between them, she had sensed he thought she _deserved_ to see him die.

Sylvanas dared not contemplate this; it had too strange a face for her to gaze upon. She needed to believe he forced this lie of life upon her, so that she might be the victim of his shadow—even after it was gone and scorched to scattered ribbons by the Light.

His eyes brooded, smoked, and slid away, drawn, as always, to the barren expanse beyond—to the glowering, pitiless white. The one thing that had power over him. _The ice._

She felt the chaos of its unbridled fury, saw it seethe upon his lifeless face as he turned to look at her again, despising, yet reveling in her.

"Today you die..." Sylvanas whispered, words layered with obsession, with hate and fear. What might have once been love, turned savage in the unrelenting dark. "I will be _free_ when you are dead."

He gazed at her without reply, bitter and aloof; yet even now, he still acknowledged her spite, giving her his cruelest smile—one last gift of rage, bestowed. She preferred to think she stole it from him, and shaped of it, a weapon.

Indifferent, he turned to look out over the battlements. Not to his coming vanquishers, but to the wilderness and its constancy he gazed, beyond its ancient mountains, and into the cradle of perpetual night. Upon the glacier's pinnacle he had wandered, the victim, the lover, forever ensnared, the frozen soul of the ice. It was the one voice he cared to heed, and if he could still feel longing, then that was what burned there, in murderous eyes and ruined heart.

His hunger. For the ice.

Sylvanas wondered what walked the deep and empty nights with him. What ghosts, what desolation still spoke, beneath the rigid weight of his wrath? It seemed to her that he was only waiting. As if restless now, to become eternal with the ice.

She smiled for vengeance, even as the gates crashed down.

He looked away from the ice—to her—and she wondered if she seemed the same to him… a cold wasteland he had taken for his own. Another thing too hungry to destroy.

_"I hate you,"_ was her virulent judgment _._

"I **_am_** you," were his last words to her.

 

* * *

 

 

A pale wraith, the mage sat beside him, on the frost-glazed stones—her gentle hand upon him, eyes wild, behind a mask of frozen tears. Her face so close to his, her soft, soft words, left bare, for the wind to shred asunder. And then, a last caress for silenced lips, an anguished glance for unseeing eyes.

It had become unbearable, Sylvanas guessed, the persistence of uncertainty. The mage had come to kill the haunting doubt, as much as she had come for him. The brittle, the unfinished—the subtler reasons why he _had_ to die.

The cold resolve of insulating blame had passed; and now, all sin forgiven in her loss, she mourned him, as the living must, grieving over the necessity of his death.

Strangely appropriate, those frozen tears.

"He was warm, once," Jaina Proudmoore whispered; and to Sylvanas, it seemed the mage scarcely remembered him at all, and only hoped the fragile, hollow words were true. He was stolen from her—swept away on a burning wind off Stratholme—by one glancing touch of fate, and the will of the patient, hungry ice.

She went to the mage, and crouched before her in the drifting snow.

He lay between them, judged, remorseless, gone.

"This is how he died," Sylvanas said, "and this is how he will be remembered. It no longer matters what he was before."

The sleety wind murmured, and she watched it flutter through his hair, as if to rouse him, breathing in a now-heedless ear, one last promise from the ice.

"You hate him," Jaina said, "but you never knew him."

"He is dead. What is there to hate?"

Jaina looked at her, exhausted, wordless; and Sylvanas reached out to tease an icy tear from the mage's cheek. Musing, she dropped it down upon him, watching as it fell into the corner of one half-open eye, where it glittered as a diamond. It was his now, to endure. And in the way of ice, there would always be—between the parting tear and any memory—that frozen skin of separation.

"He deserves no tears," Sylvanas said. "The one is enough, as it too is ice."

She stood and turned away, to walk the howling, shattered rim of what had been his world. The avenging Light had come; but it had not lingered long. Sylvanas smiled. Perhaps it feared the emptiness. So vast and impervious to its judgment. Light could only fade, where ice reigned and took such comfort in the dark.

She did not see the mage depart, but when she did, she left him as he lay—fallen, broken, and alone, his dead eyes still gazing out into the snowy wilds. Past the dimming prism of one forgotten tear.

_And I am the one,_ Sylvanas thought, _who stands in vigil at his death._

Would the ice entomb him now—sheltering him in its glacial embrace? Would it jealously hold him fast, _forever_ , where no dawn could ever break?

She turned away from the sight of him, questing once-stolen spaces in her mind. Not even a rhythm of him remained.

_Alone,_ she thought. The old dread captured and engulfed her; it was colder than he had ever been.

I am you.

Had those final words been but a taunt? Or had they been a warning of rage, of its dark voracity, and the redemption it denied?

_Impossible_ that he could feel regret. Yet had there not always been between them that haunted, hidden, _secret_ thing? The faint shadow of a broken smile was the only ghost he had left in memory.

Was it the unceasing wind off the ice, she heard? The soft wail of ancient, empty spaces. Or was it his lost soul, lingering to be her witness?

_Can I walk away?_ she wondered.

_Will it ever be enough that he cannot?_

Sylvanas pondered the implacable wilderness before her, and she wondered again what he had seen there. Would he have told her, had she but asked? She saw nothing but relentlessness, timeless and devoid.

And here, she knew, was the frozen heart that lay beneath the hurt; it was an age of frost, the ache of silence. It was the cruelty that lived in one unspoken word of solace.

_"Did it love you even as it murdered you?"_ she murmured. _"Did it ease you, knowing something lived that was colder than you?"_

Perhaps the ice had tempted him, until succumbing to the hunger, he fell to its seductions, and in his loneliness found comfort its deadly lies.

_You are not empty. You are not alone._

And in the still of her mind—poised between the Light's Grace and the unbending defiance of the damned—Sylvanas took her bitter stand and whispered to his soul as it departed, "But you _are_ alone, my King... for in the end... _you_ were the ice."

　


End file.
